


These Things Inside Myself

by Skylee



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 03:33:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/934814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skylee/pseuds/Skylee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam copes when Dean's in Hell. Or, at least, he tries to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	These Things Inside Myself

He doesn’t burn Dean’s body. He knows he should, of course, but when he looks down at the (nosoulwhyhissoul’sinhellpleaseno) body in his arms, dead green eyes that once sparkled with life, slack mouth that used to laugh and frown and pout, he knows he can’t. Bobby understands, but he shakes his head all through Sam’s digging, through him heaving Dean’s body into the ground with a final sob. It would have been a howl, a scream at the Heavens for taking this one thing he had left away from him, would have taken ten, twenty, a thousand times longer to say goodbye but he isn’t alone – Bobby’s here – and can’t deal with the comforting pat on the shoulder that isn’t from Dean and can’t afford some shallow imitation, some pittance. He can get Dean back – has to. His body is nothing. Inconsequential. He doesn’t even feel real.

The crossroads demon doesn’t look quite right, of course. Too much like Dean and not enough at the same time.  
“Sorry,” it (he) says as Sam approaches. “Could have done better, I know. Greener eyes, blonder hair…” his eyes (Sam agrees, they’re not nearly the right colour) flip to red. Sam knows it won’t make a deal with him but he stumbles and yells and stabs it in the hand and the heart and it makes him feel better. For a while.

Fights help. Punching some stranger’s face in the piss-stained alley behind a bar until they’re unrecognisable. He doesn’t have an excuse now, though. Before Dean (don’t say died, he’ll be back) was gone, there was always someone… someone saying such awful things that he clenched his fists until his nails bit into his palms. He didn’t used to punch them .They deserved it then, all of them, but now he pretends that he’s doing it for those times he just glared, and gritted his teeth, and hoped a possessive look would be enough to make them (dead) go away.

Ruby helps too, in her own depraved way. He wants to tell her to leave, to let him wallow in misery and wreak his vengeance the way he decides it should be (bloodbloodblood).  
Ruby is too small and too soft. Her hands are tiny, like spiders crawling over his skin, pads of her finger uncalloussed. Perhaps the body she’s in used to type, or talk, or laugh without the knowledge that there was something beyond her tiny little world that would have killed her without a second thought. Sam wonders sometimes, how exactly the body she’s in got to be that way – uninhabited, its owner gone somewhere else. He doesn’t want to say somewhere better. There’s no proof of that.

Ruby does her best to distract him from anything that might question why she’s here, why she insists so thoroughly that human morals no longer matter. He wants to protest that he’s still human, that he should care where this body she’s taken over comes from, and he shouldn’t just treat it as though she didn’t steal it, like he has any right to use it.  
“Because it’s wrong… and bad… and we shouldn’t”, she whispers in his ear and suddenly he’s sixteen again and sprawled on the dirty floor of the kitchenette in whatever shitty apartment they were staying in at the time, Dean standing looking down at him with a horrified look on his face.  
“It’s wrong,” he’d said then, turning back away from him as Sam blinked away tears and refused to understand. “We shouldn’t,” he’d whispered when Sam was pressed up against him, seventeen and suddenly taller than him, pushing him against the wall of their motel room with one hand shoved down the front of his pants and the other cupping his face so he couldn’t turn away. And then he’d started crying and Sam had realised what he was doing (wrongbadweshouldn’tnoSammypleasedon’t) and jerked back like Dean’s tears were physically painful as they fell on the skin of his arm.  
Having Ruby throw that back at him now, so easy and callous, doesn’t hurt, not really. All he is now is angry.  
“You can say his name, if you want,” she says, low and seductive as she moves beneath him, that smirk on her face so carefully tailored to look like Dean’s smirk, the jacket and jeans and shirt scattered across the floor behind them picked to look like Dean’s clothes. She uses his words and twists them up.  
“When you’re powerful enough,” she says, lying next to him on the bed while he pretends her hair is shorter and lighter, and that she’s taller and harder instead of so small and soft, “you could walk right into hell and get him out.” She’s lying, but the more she talks, the more he starts to wonder if the honey-laced words she whispers in his ear are true. The thirst for vengeance is momentarily slaked by her blood – what does it matter if it’s splattered across the walls or sliding down his throat? – when she offers hers to him. He drinks her blood because he wants it, and everything she says to him tastes just as sweet. He feels like perhaps now he could be strong, strong enough to march into Hell and bring Dean back. The armies and devotion mean nothing to him. Pride emans nothing to him.  
The demons get easier, slowly. Ruby smiles and says soon it won’t hurt, and he nods even though his head is pounding and his nose is pouring blood. This is how he’ll get dean back – or revenge. It hurts to think of Dean now, even when Ruby is whispering things his brother used to say to him in his ear, and then things Sam wouldn’t even let himself dream about. He still pushes her away, mostly, but it’s getting harder. He asks for her blood now, and she smiles like she knows something he doesn’t. it makes him want to tear her throat out but then he’ll have nothing.  
So Ruby helps, and he gets closer. It’s only been four months since he put Dean in the ground. Four months of screaming, searing pain is his soul.  
Today is no different. They’re done and he’s pulling his shirt over his head, hating Ruby but so grateful that she (pretends and lies) is there for him. Grateful that she knows he’s thinking about Dean when he buries himself in her and cries into her soft, warm neck.  
There’s a knock on the door and he almost doesn’t answer. It’s never anyone important.  
“You’re special”, Ruby always says. “Soon you won’t have to answer to anyone.” But Sam holds onto things. He held onto Dean’s amulet and he’ll hold onto his morals and politeness just the same. It’s only polite to answer a door.

Dean is standing in front of him now, eyes perhaps not as bright as he once remembered, smile perhaps not as wide – but that was a long time ago, and he’s been to hell and back.  
“Sammy,” he breathes, and that one word that only Dean’s allowed to say knocks his breath out and almost forces him to the ground but it can’t be Dean because Dean’s dead and Sam didn’t bring him back and goddammit there’s no one else who would, but he stabs and swipes at the Dean-thing and there’s a ringing in his ears and Bobby (how is he here?) is saying “no, it’s him ,it’s him”.  
“Are you guys… together?” Ruby doesn’t smirk directly at him, but he hears the laughter in her voice and wishes he could kill her, that he didn’t need her so much.  
“He’s my brother,” he says, and wishes that it didn’t matter.

 

-End


End file.
